100 Incredibly Useful & Free Mac Apps

Everyone loves free applications. One of the greatest things about Macs is the wealth of extremely talented developers that are willing to share their amazing creations without asking for a single cent.

We’ve compiled an enormous list of 100 amazing free Mac applications that you can download and start using today. These apps span multiple categories and offer an incredibly diverse pool of functionality so there’s definitely something here for everyone.

Hulu Desktop – Hulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that’s optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center remote controls or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu’s entire library with just six buttons. For users without remotes, the application is keyboard and mouse-enabled.

MacTheRipper – MacTheRipper is a DVD ripper (extractor). It removes CSS encryption, Macrovision protection, sets the disc’s region to ’0′ for region-free, and is capable of removing RCE region checking. It can also copy ARccOS copy-protected DVDs. This is to backup your legally-purchased DVDs onto your hard drive.

Miro – Download torrents and podcasts, play any video, and do it with style. It can play almost any video file and offers over 6,000 free internet TV shows and video podcasts. Miro has a simple, gorgeous interface designed for fullscreen HD video.

Since Miro downloads most videos, you can take your shows with you, even on an airplane. Quite simply, Miro is a better way to watch all the video you care about. Best of all, Miro is 100% free and open source, developed by a non-profit organization and volunteers around the world.

Miro Video Converter – A super simple way to convert almost any video to MP4, Ogg Theora, or a specific phone or iPod. Miro Video Converter has presets that will convert video to the correct sizes and formats for popular phones, iPods, and other media players. Just convert your video and copy it to your device.

Pandora Boy – Love Pandora.com, but tired of having to run it from a web browser? Ever wish you could control pandora without even being at your computer? Well then, look no further. PandoraBoy allows you to control your music with global hotkeys or your Apple Remote. Additionally, it supports Growl notifications so that you always know what your listening to.

SizzlingKeys – Have you ever wished you could control iTunes without leaving your current app? SizzlingKeys is an iTunes controller that lets you do just that – and more – in an intuitive and unobtrusive way.

Whether it’s to pause the player, adjust the volume, skip a track or rate a song, you can do all that and more with simple customizable keystrokes. That’s not all. You can even search your iTunes Library or Playlists with a simple keystroke, all without switching to iTunes!

It can also convert media files, transcode and act as a streaming server over unicast or multicast and IPv4 or IPv6. It doesn’t need any external codec, program or codec pack to work.

Productivity

Anxiety – Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Its aim is to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice.

Backboard – I love my Mac and my Backpack Account. Both together gives me not only the possibility to write my notes and tasks down, but more important to write them down EASILY!

Evernote – Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your notable life using your computer, phone, and the web. Everything you capture is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If you like, you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks.

Lumina – Lumina is focused to show you a simple way to track your time. The concept of Lumina is based on three columns: Projects: A project is a bundle of tasks, Tasks: A tasks is a bundle of durations, Durations: A duration is the smallest brick to calculate your total time.

Pluto – Pluto menubar is an easy-to-use tool for the management of your events, tasks, projects and notes in the most effective and productive way possible. Pluto menubar is seamlessly integrated with iCal on your Mac, on MobileMe and the iPhone. Pluto menubar is placed – of course – in the menubar and designed to always run in the background and can be accessed with one click or even better – with a global hotkey.

QuickNote is easily accessible from the menu bar, or with keyboard shortcuts: one to pop up a new note, one to edit the clipboard and one to save the clipboard without any further ado.

Snippely – Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize “snippets” in one convenient location. A snippet is a collection of one or more pieces of code and notes. Snippets are stored in groups for organization and quick retrieval

Think – Let’s limit our attention to one application—any application—at any time. Let’s make it easy to change focus when we have to. Let’s allow ourselves to bring other apps up quickly if we need them, but put them out of sight again just as quickly. Let’s rediscover how to focus, and get back to thinking.

File Sharing and Transfer

CloudApp – CloudApp allows you to share images, links, music, videos and files. Here is how it works: choose a file, drag it to the menubar and let us take care of the rest. We provide you with a short link automatically copied to your clipboard that you can use to share your upload with co-workers and friends. Additionally you can view, track and delete files right from your menubar.

CyberDuck – Cyberduck is a libre open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks. The outline view of the browser allows to browse large folder structures efficiently and you can quickly preview files with Quick Look.

To edit files, a seamless integration with any external editor application makes it easy to change content quickly. Both Amazon CloudFront and Cloud Files from Rackspace can be easily configured to distribute your content in the cloud. Many OS X core system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour and the Keychain are supported and 30 translations make you feel at home.

Dropbox – Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers. Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!) Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.

droplr – Droplr is the best way to share files from your Mac on the internet. Period. Whether you want to link to an image or embed one somewhere, Droplr makes sharing images on the web easy. Need to share a text note? Or how about a code snippet? We’ll even syntax highlight it for you.

Filezilla – FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.

Jing – Snap a picture or take a video of your screen and share instantly over the web, IM, email.

Transmission – Transmission is a cross-platform BitTorrent client. Transmission is designed to balance power and usability. We’ve set the defaults to Just Work and it only takes a few clicks to configure advanced features like watch directories, bad peer blocklists, and the web interface. When Ubuntu chose Transmission as its default BitTorrent client, one of the most-cited reasons was its easy learning curve.

Application and File Launchers

aLaunch – It is an application launcher, and is operated via the status menu. You can chose to display icons at 16 pixels – 64 pixels. Files and folders can be registered with aLunch as well. Folders will be opened in the Finder. Different categories can be registered by using groups and separators.

Google Quick Search Box – Quick Search Box is an open source search box that allows you to search data on your computer and across the web. With Quick Search Box you can search for information from just about anywhere. You can then perform actions on the search results, such as launching applications, emailing friends, or playing a song.

Quicksilver – A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data. Quicksilver is an application launcher on steroids. Though no longer in development, it can still provide plenty of additional functionality to your system. Read our beginner’s guide here.

Image and Text Editing

Bean – Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor), designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. Bean is Open Source, fully Cocoa, and is available free of charge! MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That is Bean’s niche.

Blender – Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. Discover the wide toolset available in Blender, defining a complete pipeline (from modeling to sequence editing) controlled by a flexible and consistent user interface.

DrawBerry – With DrawBerry, you have all the possibilities the vectorial drawing offers you in a free, easy to use and powerful application. If you don’t need applications such Illustrator or Inkscape and you want to create some simple (or less simple) illustrations, DrawBerry is for you.

Fraise – Fraise is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.6 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. It should work perfectly for a whole variety of needs – like web programming, script editing, making a to do list and so on

Fraise has all open documents in a list with beautiful Quick Look icons to your left just like e.g. iTunes so you can easily switch between many documents – you can also choose to display them as tabs if you prefer it that way.

GIMP – GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. Numerous digital photo imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP. Fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt simply choosing the corrective mode in the transform tools. Eliminate lens’ barrel distortion and vignetting with a powerful filter but a simple interface.

Google SketchUp – Google SketchUp is software that you can use to create 3D models of anything you like. Redecorate your living room. Design a new piece of furniture. Model your city for Google Earth. Create a skatepark for your hometown, then export an animation and share it on YouTube. There’s no limit to what you can create with SketchUp.

Inkscape – An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

OpenOffice – OpenOffice 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Picasa – Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Sharing your best photos with friends and family is as easy as pressing a button!

Pixus – The AIR pixel ruler application. A handy tool for web and interface designers. Measure the screen objects in pixels using both mouse and keyboard control. Preview your design with skins and presets.

Seashore – Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing.

It is based around the GIMP’s technology and uses the same native file format. However, unlike the GIMP, Seashore only aims to serve the basic image editing needs of most computer users, not to provide a replacement for professional image editing products. Seashore was created by Mark Pazolli who led the project until the end of 2009.

Scribus – Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/eComStation and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, Spot Colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

TextWrangler – A general-purpose text editor for light-duty composition, data-file editing (where the data files consist of plain [unstyled] text), and manipulation of text-oriented data. TextWrangler supports working with both plain-text and Unicode files (with the exception of files written using right-to-left writing systems, such as Hebrew or Arabic). TextWrangler also features an integrated spelling checker, as well as integration with Word Services-aware spelling and grammar checkers.

Communication

Adium – Adium is a free and open source instant messaging application for Mac OS X, written using Mac OS X’s Cocoa API, released under the GNU GPL and developed by the Adium team. Based on the libpurple protocol library, Adium can connect you to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services (see further down for the list) and then chat with other people using those services.

Colloquy – Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.

Google Notifier – The Google Notifier is an application that shows you alerts in your menu bar, so you can see when you have new Gmail messages or upcoming Google Calendar events without having to open a web browser.

ooVoo – With ooVoo, you can connect with anyone, anytime, with video calls, video messages, phone calls, text and more. Use ooVoo to get face time with people you can’t meet in person (and save travel time and money!). ooVoo makes life easier and more fun.

Skype – Skype is software that enables the world’s conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Everyday, people also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles.

Thunderbird 3 – Thunderbird, as a messaging system, is uniquely positioned as the tool that users can use to integrate as many of their communications as they want. By combining an open architecture, a powerful extensibility and customization framework, and a person-centric perspective on communications, Thunderbird is a powerful yet enjoyable tool to help individuals manage their online interactions — whether that’s email, instant messaging, social networking messages, or other types of message.

System Utilities

AddressBookSync – AddressBookSync is a free Mac OS X application to download profile pictures and other Facebook data to Address Book cards. This is a handy tool to keep your contacts’ pictures updated if you have numerous Facebook friends in your Mac OS X Address Book.

AppCleaner – AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps. Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily. AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them. Simply drop an application onto the AppCleaner window. It will find for the related files and you can delete them by clicking the delete button.

AppFresh – AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X. AppFresh works by checking the excellent osx.iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.

Camouflage – Do you have way too many items on your desktop? Do you hate cleaning up that mess? Camouflage is the right utility for you. It hides all the icons and leaves nothing but the pure wallpaper.

ClipMenu – ClipMenu can manage clipboard history. You can record 8 clipboard types, from plain text to image. To paste a recorded item, you just pop up menu by invoking the shortcut key, and select a menu item from the menu. You can also register texts you frequently use, like e-mail addresses, user IDs and so on, as snippets. You can paste these snippets from the menu, too.

coconutBattery – coconutBattery isn’t just a tool which shows you only the current charge of your battery – it also shows you the current maximum capacity of it in relation to the original capacity your battery had as it left the factory. You also get information about the battery-loadcycles (how often did you fully load your battery), the current charger (coconutBattery even warns you if you plugged in a wrong charger for your Notebook) and last but not least information about the age of your Mac.

Burn – There are a lot of ways to approach burning discs. Burn keeps it simple, but still offers a lot of advanced options. Keep your files safe and share them. Burn your files to a disc so you can access them later on. Choose different filesystems so you can share your files with people with different operating systems. Change advanced settings like, file permissions, the disc icon, file dates and more on the fly in Burn’s inspector.

Caffeine – Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.

Carbon Copy Cloner – Spinning for years at 75MPH, your hard drive’s catastrophic crash could really hinder your productivity. Use CCC to make a bootable backup of your digital life today!

DateLine – DateLine displays a linear calendar on your Mac desktop which provides easy access to iCal and your events. The appearance of the DateLine is endlessly customizable and themeable.

Desktop Curtain – Desktop Curtain displays your favorite desktop picture just in front of your real desktop, so you won’t have to clean up each time you need to take a screenshot. And it’s really easy to control — just control- or right-click on Desktop Curtain’s desktop picture to access its settings or quit.

Dock Dodger – Sometimes, you find an application that you really, really like, but when you run it, the icon takes up valuable space in your Dock. With Dock Dodger, you can rid almost any application of its Dock icon, giving you your Dock back. With Dock Doger, removing the Dock icon is as easy as Drag and Drop. Simply drag in the application you want to Un-Dock and Dock Dodger takes care of the rest. When you re-launch that application, it will be sans Dock icon. Want the Dock icon back? Just re-drag the application into Dock Dodger and everything’s back to normal.

DockSpaces – A tiny application that allows you to have up to 10 different docks and swap anytime you want from the menu bar.

FlyGesture – FlyGesture is activated like Exposé or Dashboard, bringing up a transparent window of “guides” to move your mouse through. Moving your mouse through the guides lets FlyGesture know what action or actions you want to be performed, such as closing a window or opening an application. Not getting it? Here’s a movie that demonstrates creating and using a new gesture to open Safari.

GeekTool – GeekTool is a PrefPane (System Preferences module) for Mac OS 10.5. It let you display on your desktop different kind of informations, provided 3 default plugins: File plugin to monitor MacOS X activity with /var/log/system.log, or any file that you want to follow.Shell mode to launch custom scripts or commands like “df” to check space left on filesystems, “uptime” to monitor load of your machine… Finally, Image mode helps you monitor bandwith usage, CPU loads, memory availability of your server, via tools like MRTG or RRD.

Ghost – There are lots of files on your computer that you can’t see. Apple has conveniantly hidden many system files from you, so that your computer doesn’t look like an ugly, cluttered mess.However, they have not provided any easy way to create your own hidden files, or even to view theirs. Ghost provides a simple, user friendly way to do both of these things. Simply drag and drop a file or folder into the list, then uncheck (or check) its checkbox and the item will be instantly hidden or un-hidden.

Growl – Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications. Notifications are a way for your applications to provide you with new information, without you having to switch from the application you’re already in.

Jumpcut – Jumpcut is an application that provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.

Monolingual – Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. I don’t know about you, but I use my computer in only one (human) language — English. And I’m willing to bet that you do too, albeit perhaps not English. So why do you have a bunch of localization files for the Mac OS X operating system filling up your hard drive? Enter Monolingual — a handy utility for reclaiming your space for more useful things… like international mp3 files, email or whatever you like.

NameChanger – NameChanger Rename a list of files quickly and easily. See how the names will change as you type.

Name Mangler – The Finder is good at a lot of things, but renaming a lot of files is not one of them. Automator can help, but it can be a bit intimidating to use. Enter Name Mangler, which makes short work of all your file renaming tasks.

Paparazzi – Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of webpages. It’s written in Objective-C using the Cocoa API and the WebKit framework. It was inspired by webkit2png, a commandline tool written by Paul Hammond in pyObjC.

SaveCircle – SaveCircle is a little tool that can save in chosen time the document of the frontmost application, so that you don’t have to worry about loosing some work. This is simple, transparent and efficient and work with every applications.

SnapNDrag – SnapNDrag lets you take a screenshot by just clicking a button and dragging the resulting screenshot off. For example, to email a screenshot, you would drag the screenshot from SnapNDrag to the Mail application. It is that simple. No hard-to-remember key combinations, no file conversion to deal with, no file dialog boxes to navigate, no temporary files to erase later on.

Teleport – Teleport lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs. Simply reach an edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your nearby Mac, which also becomes controlled by your keyboard. The pasteboard can be synchronized, and you can even drag & drop files between your Macs.

TinkerTool – TinkerTool is an application that gives you access to additional preference settings Apple has built into Mac OS X. This allows to activate hidden features in the operating system and in some of the applications delivered with the system. The tool makes sure that preference changes can only affect the current user. The program will never change any component of the operating system, so the integrity of your system is not put at risk, and there will be no negative effect on system updates.

Todos – Sometimes you just don’t want to take time going to your Applications folder or searching around your hard drive. Just click a quick hotkey (Command-Option-Control-T) and Todos will simply appear. Todos’ job is simple. Todos doesn’t do more than it says. Like its definition in Spanish, Todos will show you everything. Todos shows you all your applications in a complete dock. All of us have a plethora of programs, and the Apple dock just can’t fit them all.

Wallpaper Clocks – Vladstudio and Softshape Development proudly introduce Wallpaper Clocks – desktop wallpaper which refreshes every minute to keep your time and date precise as well as stylish in many artistic ways!

YemuZip – Drag, drop, done. Making zip files cannot be any easier. YemuZip is an easy-to-use application for making zip files. Just drag, drop, name your zip file and you’re done. The Finder’s Archive function makes zip files that contains Mac-specific information that, when extracted on a PC, looks like garbage. YemuZip lets you choose between a PC-compatible format and a Mac format that preserve all the Mac-specific metadata.

Internet and Browsers

AllBookmarks – AllBookmarks adds a new item to your Mac OS X menu bar giving you quick access to all your bookmarks. All your Safari, Firefox and Flock bookmarks are shown and can be selected. AllBookmarks also gives you access to your 1Password 1Click bookmarks so you can navigate to a page, fill the form, and submit it, all with a single click!

Aptana Studio – Aptana Studio is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with thousands of additional plugins created by the community.

Camino – Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users. Built from the ground up exclusively for Mac OS X, Camino is designed to make your browsing experience better. With features like annoyance blocking, tab overview, and phishing and malware detection, Camino keeps you browsing safer and faster on the Web.

Flock – The award winning social browser (Twitter, Facebook and blog integration). The people here at Flock are committed to building a browser unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before – because we start by focusing on user needs. We take pride in solving for common behaviors on the Web that seem clunky today, and will seem ridiculous tomorrow. We’re taking you there.

Fluid App – Web applications like Gmail, Facebook, Campfire and Pandora are becoming more and more like desktop applications every day. Running each of these web apps in an individual tab in your browser can be a real pain. Fluid lets you create a Site Specific Browser (SSB) out of any website or web application, effectively turning your favorite web apps into desktop apps.

Mocha – Mocha is a tool that monitors your network activity and keeps a record of Ip / Mac address pairings and firewall logs. It will give a warning when it notices any suspicious activity, like any changes in Mac address or any connection attempt to the firewall.

NetNewsWire – Looking for an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac? You’ve found it! The Eddy award-winning NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs.

Newsfire – Simple to use and packed with features, NewsFire makes it a joy to keep atop the constant flow of information on the web. It’s easy to filter and organize your news with NewsFire’s smart groups. Build your own feeds with custom rules, or drag and drop to create groups of related content.

Opera – Surf the Web with lightning speed, using the fastest browser ever. Everything from how Web pages load to how you open tabs is optimized to happen almost instantly. You can even speed up browsing on slow connections, with Opera Turbo.

Quiet Read – Quiet Read is my new application that lets you save any link for later. Sometimes, when I am browsing the web, I want to store a link for later. There are note taking applications and everything-buckets to do that, but I wanted something light and simple. Simple as dragging a link onto a menu bar item to store it.

Shiira – Shiira is a web browser written in Cocoa. It uses the KHTML rendering engine provided by Apple’s Web Kit. Since this is the same rendering engine used by Safari, HTML content rendered by Shiira will look the same as in Apple’s own browser. All source code is publicly available under the BSD license. We hope that our code will help other developers just starting out on their own Web Kit projects.

SiteSucker for Mac OS X – SiteSucker is a Macintosh application that automatically downloads Web sites from the Internet. It does this by asynchronously copying the site’s Web pages, images, backgrounds, movies, and other files to your local hard drive. Just enter a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), press return, and SiteSucker can download an entire Web site.

Sunrise – Sunrise is an open source web browser based on WebKit for Mac OS X. The main window of Sunrise has the browser, bookmarks, downloads, source codes and find bars. You do not need to look for the hidden panels because the one window has all of them.

Wyzo – Wyzo is an awesome new browser that optimizes your online media experience. It will accelerate your web downloads, let you download torrents with a single click, discover media in your browser and much more.

Xyle Scope – Using Xylescope it is easy to fine-tune CSS values. Simply select the desired element by clicking on the rendered page to bring up the whole cascade of rules applied to the selected element and its ancestors. Change any CSS value and hit return to see the resulting effect immediately regardless in which style sheet the altered style rule resides.

Misc

Bodega – Welcome to Bodega, the world’s most innovative way to discover and obtain the hottest and latest applications for your Mac. Bodega is like a storefront right on your Mac’s desktop, one that’s chock-full of software apps from Mac developers around the world. Just download and install the Bodega app, and you have access to an ever-growing catalog of software to meet your every computing need.

MAMP – The abbreviation “MAMP” stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP. With just a few mouse-clicks, you can install Apache, PHP and MySQL for Mac OS X! MAMP installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer, be it PowerBook or iMac. Like similar packages from the Windows- and Linux-world, MAMP comes free of charge. MAMP is installed in the typical Mac fashion: very easily. MAMP will not compromise any existing Apache installation already running with your OS X. You can install Apache, PHP and MySQL without starting a script or having to change any configuration files!

Help Us Find More!

That should be enough apps to feed your need for apps for at least a week. Let us know which of the downloads above you found to be the most helpful.

Also, be sure to leave links to all your favorite free apps that aren’t listed above so we can all check them out.

Popular Posts

Alfred is another great application launcher, http://www.alfredapp.com/. It’s under very active development and is totally free.

@sidn3y

Came in here just to make sure this was on here. Surprised it wasn’t.

http://twitter.com/saviopalm Savio

I second that! Alfred should be on this list!

http://www.coroflot.com/joshuajohnson Joshua Johnson

Good call guys, I just downloaded Alfred and am loving it. Goodbye GQSB.

Don

Alfred is great. Put it on the list!. Make it 101!

http://www.twitter.com/_the1_ Ilja

+1 for Alfred

http://www.myfacture.com netking17

+1

http://www.parkeyparker.co.uk/ Aaron Parker

I completely agree! Alfred even made me switch from QuickSilver!

iyyy69

I’ve been hearing about Alfred (as well as many other quick launchers) for a while now, but never understood the point since Spotlight works so well. But after so many call-outs for Alfred, I decided to give it a try.

It’s pretty cool!

http://twitter.com/iTomath Thomas Furlonger

Alfred is simply amazing, I was also surprised that it wasn’t on the list.

http://twitter.com/sulcalibur Suleiman Leadbitter

Alfred is awesome! Highly recommended!

Aaron

Thank you for adding this to the list – if someone hadn’t, I might have flipped. Alfred is an incredible app – unbelievably fast, sleek aesthetic, and very functional. It is without a doubt one of the few “Must Have” apps I have.

http://trickpedia.com Sid

Awesome List .. !!

Kerguio

great list.. but in browsers, Chrome is missing… no?

daba

hahaha NO.

I’m sure we could add some very well known programs, but this list is meant to get you to find NEW software, not stuff that everyone knows about.

If not, feel free to add safari, internet explorer, firefox and itunes to the list.

http://www.michaelaleo.com Michael Aleo

Internet… Explorer… to a list of Mac apps…

John

I mean, safari is already on your computer as is itunes. Since he did say free apps, he should have added chrome and firefox, and since he did say useful in the title, internet explorer is not listed by default.

http://xyrer.wordpress.com Xyrer

Instead of VLC, I use mplayer osx extended, it has everything you may want on a video player and none of the problems I’ve had with VLC.

And the best thing I’ve discovered recently is instinctiv, an excelent music player for the people -like me- who are tired of the itunes bloatware. You can find it at instinctiv.com

Pooria

So you haven’t tried out Movist yet… try it, it’s by far THE best movie player on OS X.

Shaylin

Well, I was gonna comment and tell you that you missed Freedom, which is an awesome app that closes your computer off from the internet for however long you tell it to (you have to completely reboot to get internet access back). It’s great because it keeps you from stopping your work every ten minutes to check email or Facebook or whatever. When I got Freedom it was, well, free. Now, unfortunately, I see that it’s $10, so doesn’t qualify for this post. But it’s still an awesome app, and worth the ten bucks, if you ask me.

Runar

I’m sure it’s a great application, but I don’t see why I should pay anyone to disconnect me from the Internet when I can do it manually for free. And then I don’t need to reboot when I decide I want to go online!

http://www.sullysrants.com Sully

Excellent List – several new programs to play with. Thanks,

Matt

I would recommend this light little audio player for Macs called Vox. It is designed for when you need to play multiple audio files but don’t want to mess with an iTunes library (they aren’t songs, for example). It’s tiny and light but incredibly packed with features.

(nope, I have no involvement with them either)

http://twitter.com/Mac_xim Macxim

Totally agree. Great list anyway.

Andy

Audio player: Cog

…And I’ve tried them all.

SZK

Thanks for the list. You should put more cleaner apps up there though!

Lucas C

You forgot Alfred, the best quicklook app ever ! :)

Timmy

DropCopy is by far the best file transfer program its like sleeve of wizard.

First up, great list! Some (many) of these apps mentioned play a role in my daily work flow. One that I use daily and that is not mentioned here is Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com), a reference management application which I use to organize my research papers.

Disclaimer: Beside being a (free app loving) grad student, I’m also part of the Mendeley team :)

Bytecontroller- Adds iTunes controls to the menu bar and global hot keys for iTunes in the smallest, most resource-efficient way possible! Great for those of us without media controls on older keyboards. It also has a setting to disappear if iTunes isn’t open.

SoundSource- replace your volume control in the menu bar with volume controls per input/output AND easily choose your input/output device without opening System Preferences. Great for USB or Bluetooth audio devices.

===========
…..and kind of a specific app, but for those on 3D social networks A.K.A. Second Life ;D
Emerald Viewer- Adds a TON of incredibly useful features to the official viewer released by Linden Lab. It’s free and incredibly useful!

===========
A couple of widgets I use all the time and are no longer developed but still perfectly functional and incredibly useful:

PhotoDrop: Drag any image (files or directly from a web browser for example) onto the widget and perform basic operations (resize, crop, enhance) as well as various cool effects like push-pins. Then drag the finished image out of the widget and over to:

Image Upload: Drop any image (like the one you just finished in PhotoDrop) onto this widget and a few moments later you’ll hear a chime and be ready to paste a URL to the image online, like this one: http://bit.ly/bebQqj

http://www.iynque.com iynque

DateLine isn’t free D:

Too bad, it looked kinda cool.

Watcher

Awesome list!!many of these goodies I have already installed in my mac!!Great article!!

Zach

Where’s Chrome?

http://www.espace.com.eg ma7dy

What about winclone?

ernie

my comments is i still haven”t found what i need[ie] how to get my music out of itunes in the same way as it went in [acd format].

http://raphaelddl.com RaphaelDDL

I don’t know if someone said already but have a cool website that i’ve met, called OpenMac, with some useful open source projects.

A really great, free and high quality tool for converting and demuxing mpeg files. Only catch here: You need the apple quicktime mpeg component for it to function.

http://Deusdictum.com Mark

It seriously hurts watching such great resources get sucked into crappy marketing bullcrap. 100, seriously? Most of that isn’t even remotely close to useful. And half of them ain’t even working outside of the US.

http://www.uber3d.com Kapil

I have placed an order for my Macbook Pro and it should be delivered soon. The list with comments is interesting and will surely help me and new mac users. Will stay tuned. Thanks.

http://bradhalcrow.com Brad

Wow. I was like Lyyy69. I’ve heard of Alfred so many times but to date been content with Spotlight. With the rise of enthusiasm for Alfred above I couldn’t help but give it a whirl.

Now I see what all the fuss is about. It’s part of that rare breed… uber simple, uber powerful. My kind of app.

To use this to it’s full potential you have to pay the license fee of $14,95 and
take my word for it it’s more than worth it. I have a giganews platinum account
and use 50 simultanious connections. NZBvortex does post processing aswell,
auto repair (par/par2), auto extract, auto cleanup (many options, you can add
file extensions yourself that you want to be cleaned up as well), bandwidth throttling, etc, etc.

The support is great. I’ve submitted 2 bug reports (a few versions back) and got
response within a day, the next release (a few days after I submitted the bugs) it
was fixed.

Same for new features I suggested. The program doesn’t hog cpu/memory resources at all not even when having multiple downloads or when it’s post processing.

I’ve used all the more popular usenet leechers like Unison, Sabnzb, nzbdrop.
Sabnzb has more features as well as Unison but for just grabbing nzb’s NZBvortex
wins by a distance.

If you just need a client to download binaries from usenet and don’t care about
reading/posting then NZBvortex is by far the best you can get. Pull out the $14,95
for the license as it’s more than worth it. The free version misses the good stuff
and without them I’d stick to NZBdrop instead.

“a multi-engine player designed for playing movies nicely for a person who likes to watch or present movies on their computer (such as the casual viewer or the video artist). This program features full screen or border-less floating windows, convenient controls for scrubbing or queuing movies, and on the fly playlist creation.”

Frane

Nerdtool… Like Geektool, a little harder to configure, not so nice GUI but much lighter to run, it doesn’t use so much resources.

http://www.webcreationuk.com/websiteoptions.htm WebCreationUK

This really is “the list” mate! Many thanks!

http://www.ianmayman.com/ Ian Mayman

Good list of apps, but too American. For example, Hulu… only available in America; Pandora… only available in America; Spotify… not even mentioned here (because it is not available in America). Are people not in America – that is the majority of people online – not worth considering?

About Zipeg
Absolutely free universal .rar and .zip file opener. This tiny but mighty utility also opens .tar, .tgz, .bzip2 and many other compressed archives. Zipeg is very simple and intuitive to use and works on Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger on both intel and powerpc macs. Zipeg supports password protected and multipart zip and rar files. If you ever needed single song, picture or document out of huge archive – Zipeg might be exactly what you need.

Zipeg allows:
- to see what’s inside archive before you extract;
- to open files in Preview or other associated application directly from the archive;
- to choose where to put extracted files;
- to extract individual items simply by dragging them to desktop;
- to preserve resource forks, Finder attributes and symlinks;
- to open multi-part and password protected archives.

What’s New in this Version
- fully compatible with Snow Leopard;
- fixed bzip2 extraction issues;
- improved and cleaned up user interface

I found an app called Prey. http://preyproject.com/
It is a theft security aoo that if your Computer or phone is stolen or lost
you can trace it any time it is turned on. They do have a Pro version too.
It is open source and works on Mac, Win and Linux.

http://www.google.com Raymundo Swithenbank

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http://www.skitch.com Lillian Wicklund

Skitch! Check out this screenshot app! Beautiful interface and easy to use!

http://www.kicksf.com/ 传奇私服

传奇sf
Thanks very much for this wonderful blog;this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the day.

http://www.techcraftstand.com Techcraft stand

I just read through your post and I enjoyed it. I am wondering if you’re intending to publish additional articles to go in conjunction with this blog?

My hands-down favorite is Spark. I use it about 1000 times a day, literally!

Their description:
“Spark is a powerful, and easy Shortcuts manager. With Spark you can create Hot Keys to launch applications and documents, execute AppleScript, control iTunes, and more… You can also export and import your Hot Keys library, or save it in HTML format to print it. Spark is free, so use it without moderation!”http://www.shadowlab.org/softwares/spark.php

http://imperion.pl Paweł P.

Great list!
Best regards!

http://www.tellibus.com Abdelaziz Bennouna

Komodo Edit is a must have. It’s a free multi-language IDE from ActiveState (paying version exists as well = Komodo IDE). I use it for my web projects, it has all basic features.

http://websitecenter.ca/ Iouri Goussev

Try uTorrent for mac. Fast and free torrent downloader.

http://www.quranotafseer.com jack

i want to give some information about very nice application. the name of application is tuitalk .
every body must try it. Trust me you can make free calls to 40 countries.quran tutorsonline quran tutors

johnny Referro

uTorrent is better than transmisssion

http://www.funteasers.net sports

Your sidebar is kinda off-centered in Safari, pal ;)

http://www.desiredtech.co.uk Web Design

Brilliant resource. I love doing web design using a mac, so much better than Windows.

http://www.martinvaresio.com.ar Martin

You will be a winner.

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When you don’t live in US, Boxee is not so useful because interaction with all US services is not really possible. So I much more prefer to use XBMC for music & video. And when you are a developer, Textmate is one of the most useful code editor to use ;-)

aakash chhabria

MIRO

AMAZING APP … REALLY A MUST HAV FOR A MAC BOOK PRO … ONE CONCISE APP FOR ALL UR VIDEOS , MUSIC , PODCAST ETC …

JUST AMAZZZZZZZZZINNNNNNN …..

LazyGrey

Hey, question: Does anybody know of an app that will check DVD’s for errors before you sit through half the movie only to be disappointed midway through?? I check out a lot of library DVD’s and this is a pretty serious concern for me. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

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Nice list of good apps. I have a few of these and they make life a lot easier. Good post

PAUL ORTIZ

Is there a free app out there that can identify exact duplicate files in your computer and allow the user the decide whether or not to delete the files creating more space in on the hard drive?

http://none Saurabh

try app called Singular, its free and do exactly what u asked

http://www.aeroporika.gr Aeroporika

Nice list of good apps. I have a few of these and they make life a lot easier. Great post

carla

put in firefox,kid pik and comic life

myway

voice recognition is,not on the list… why ?

squiddy

Is there any video file merger software? I would like to add more avi files to a huge one.

squiddy

..and of course I thought a free and not shareware program.

Else: I use instead of Finder the muCommander. It is similar to Total Commander.

http://echomon.co.uk/ Christina Hendricks

Actually This post is exactly what I am interested. we need some more good information. Please add more good information that would help others in such good way.

http://www.mycoupon.gr kouponi

I absolutely love the “Anxiety”! There is a to-do list software which is easy and actually helps! The connection with the ical was a huge plus!

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I love the All Bookmarks! Made my life easier!
Very helpful post! Thank you! :)

JJ

These are all dumb

The Star

These apps are terrible who would use them

man by river

i take poops that are cooler than these apps

http://www.kaysoksila.gr/ Καυσοξυλα φθηνα

I have use the most of them

Alec

You should add Skitch and Evernote. Two of the best pair of Mac apps ever.

aymos

Is there a free software for managing daily expenses at very basic level?.. Like grocery , beer, food etc.?? Not the Hi-Fi ones with bank account and all.. Just the basic one.. thanks in advance

Aloha! I’ve been reading your blog for quite some time now and finally got the bravery to go ahead and give you a shout out from Athens! Keep up the great work and rock on!

http://seo seo

Whoa! This blog looks just like my old one! It’s on a entirely different topic but it has pretty much the same page layout and design. Superb choice of colors!

http://www.contestheat.com Giannis

After reading this list I’ve downloaded on my MB Pro almost all the above apps! Great mass-up article!

William Goodall

I think that they should include BootXChanger because it lets you customize your bootlogo to something better.

http://www.kylewebs.tumblr.com Kyle Webs

Hey, I just wanted to add a couple…

Trillian – chat

And it doesn’t have a mac app, but SpringPad is a really awesome Evernote alternative. I’d consider it way better than Evernote because it offers the same thing, but it’s completely free.

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The new Zune browser is surprisingly good, but not as good as the iPod’s. It works well, but isn’t as fast as Safari, and has a clunkier interface. If you occasionally plan on using the web browser that’s not an issue, but if you’re planning to browse the web alot from your PMP then the iPod’s larger screen and better browser may be important.

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It is fantastic that you reviewed 100 apps for MAC. After reading this article I am thinking of buying a Mac and replacing my Windows PC.

Sophie

I can’t seem to find the apps on the page, can someoe help?
I am eager to download lots of free games so plz hurry!:)
Thanx for your concern and thanx for reading!:)

HMSTORK

Great….however I am looking for a free application that can tweek, and clean-up my registry and hard disk. Thanks

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good list,and i need a many application mac book air .please file share

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Great list of apps! Keep up the good work!

Macplayer

Thank you for this great list.

Kent Morstain

There are some great apps. Here is a list that are most freeware. Give them a google and you will like what you see.

HYPERDOCK — Like Windows 7 you can hover over the open apps like Outlook or Word and all the screens will show.

RedQuits — Hit the Red X and the app closes

Right Zoom – click the green button and the whole window maximizes

SMCFan Control – tells you how hot the laptop is and how fast the fan is running.

Growly – Alternative to OneNote

Free Memory PRO – set it’s threshold and it auto free’s RAM.

Trash-it — for locked files — if they won’t empty from trash…they will with this app.

PASTOR – password database. Just remember one password…the rest are in there

FontBook.app – Not sure if this is native or a download – If you can’t remember the last time I used simple chinese or russian you get to remove those fonts. They take up space and slow the apps down.

CoBOOK.app – Connects up with your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Google Voice, and XING and pulls their profile picture down into your contacts. I don’t run this all that often, but it is pretty cool.